IP block - ha! There are world-wide proxy pools for me to dive into. The water is great and it makes my metallic skin glisten like the chrome on a classic automobile. I'll grab 120 of them and make trades every half second on average. Resistance to the swarm is useless. You will be assimilated.

Call me crazy-paranoid, but I don't use Mt. Gox and I don't direct new users to them. With the errors I have seen them commit and the time they were cracked, I suspect they have less bitcoins then their db have recorded for their users (unless their profits have been big enough to fill in the gap). Who knows what really happened that one day when someone cleaned their clock and they had to "roll back" trades. They push around huge lumps of coins that suggest the whole operation has a decent manual aspect to it, and coins probably get "lost."  I wonder what would happen if everyone withdrew all of their BTC from gox in one day. Would there be a run on the bank?

Anyway, sorry to get off track on my tirade.

I don't trust any service to store the private keys of my wallet, and it would be wrong to tell a new user who knows nothing about bitcoin or past mistakes to trust any of these services. Especially since there are ones out there that do not store your password on their servers (strongcoin, my wallet, and android wallet).

Centralized private key storage is a bad idea and gives a huge incentive to hackers and the owners of said services to walk off with potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoins.

Your faith in your own security makes me feel you have not dealt with actual cyber attacks yourself. And hell, if you have a few hundred thousand dollars of bitcoins on a server that you control, there are brute force techniques that are much older than computers that would be effective in getting your server password off of you. Bitcoin is being adopted by the criminal underworld and they will know where you live.

Sorry if that sounds a little too threatening, but it is the reason I would be careful in setting up an ewallet service (and I have considered this all myself at one point).

You are sure about that? Let me know when it appears. I would like to set up my bot on it. It will just trade at whatever the exchange rate is on gox. If you try to filter it out with a captcha, there is a fine automated turk that will help me with that. The irony of using a human to serve a machine to serve a human to undercut other humans is too sweet to miss.

If you really want a human only exchange, you need to go here:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/In_Person_Traders
I suspect that they all just use the bot derived price from their cell phones though.

If you are being practical, a piece of paper would work as well as a coin and is cheaper to produce & transport.

This is really just a collectable item that looks good. I don't know why he hasn't explored making funded coins and selling them.

Hmmm, guess I should actually read the full copy before jumping to conclusions.

Sorry coinedbits.

Perhaps a paragraph break might help after "world."

First paragraph for reference:

I disagree. I think bots are exceptional at rapidly converging on a correct price.

Also, don't think of a bot as a bad thing if you are a trader. A bot is an algorithm written by someone who has to predict how to predict what way a price is going. If you ever played an RTS game against a bot, you will realize they don't have any intuition or smarts. They will always do the same thing over and over. Predict what the bots will do, and you win. Good luck trying to predict what the humans will do.

You are right, after reading through their faq, it seems like instawallet should be taken off the list as they too store private keys on their server. It is a shame as they make it so darn easy to use their service.

I point people all of the time to weusecoins.com to educate and get people started on bitcoins. I don't want new user's faith in the system to be destroyed due to your server getting hacked. It doesn't matter if your identity is known. The legal system doesn't seem set up to protect users and the liability you might face if you defraud or just fail to protect user's coins seems to be limited to a tarnished reputation.

As a community we can never forget mybitcoin. Someone made off with a lot of money, and no one was ever caught. Heck the person that most likely committed the crime is practically the face of bitcoin with his video series.

Assuming we have 100% faith in your moral caliber:
Do you believe that your system is uncrackable? Keep in mind, your server is a vault with money in it. Digital money that can be taken away and never found again in a heart-beat. I wouldn't put that much faith in a wordpress driven site on a LAMP stack.

New users need to be directed to a system that can't be abused and doesn't represent a honey pot for hackers.

The printcoin.com bills and cheques come from a dynamically created pdf file. I was considering opening it up for others to print from via the web, and also with downloaded code that they could execute locally.

I don't think flexcoin should be listed on the getting started page. It is a bank, not a wallet service. It is way too complicated for a new user, and I have no idea where private keys are being stored, but I am guessing on their server. This could be the same as replacing one scam hacked server (mybitcoin) with another.

Instawallet, strongcoin, My Wallet, android wallet, and other services that focus on open source and not storing private keys with some operator is important.

http://coinedbits.com/buy.php

"Finally a tangible physical Bitcoin! Carry these bitcoins around in your pocket.
.....

Help us put as many of these coins into circulation. Purchase several and pass them on to others. Keep checking back here to see where it has gone.
....
Each coin has a unique code on the back....
"
I am not much of a newb, but reading most of the text of coinedbits makes me think that I am actually getting a bitcoin when I order these.

For a actual newb, this would be very deceptive.

A skeptical newb might actually go to the FAQ and see:

"Are these coins real Bitcoins?
No. They have no real Bitcoin value. They are a novelty or souvenir coin."

I have sold you a duck, contains no real duck.

These are cool, and keep selling them, but be up front about the lack of a duck (not in the faq page). Otherwise, people hungry for duck who buy your duck will be disappointed by the lack of duck in your duck. They will think poorly of ducks in general and maybe will just stick to chicken.

Actually that was not the memo. The memo is that bitcoin is a solid capitalist tool that has no aspects of wealth redistribution built in.

I agree that the Soviet Union was not truly socialist, but I think socialism/communism is the unstable force as it requires a power structure to manage it, a power structure that eventually starts to just work for its own good.

Toss a hundred people on an island (gently) give them each some silver coins (doesn't have to be equal amounts) and even without any power structure, very quickly a fairly efficient economic system will develop and people will do things for each other.

Capitalism is not just stable, it is almost innate, and requires no central power (though it helps to have someone create a decent thing to act as money - otherwise cowry shells will do).

The nice thing about bitcoin, is it can separate the money system from the political system. The political system determines who is in power, what policies should be enacted (do we go to war, do we create homeless shelters, how much do we tax people...), and whatever. The money system is for individuals to do transactions. A monetary system and a political system can be two separate (but interacting) systems. Tying them together has been out of necessity all this time as you need central authority controlling the minting of money. With bitcoin, you can have a global monetary system that is not controlled by any authority other than the transaction rules laid out in the initial paper.

It will be nice when one day we neither have fait currencies or problematic precious metals.

Simcity taught me all you need is a road and electricity to upgrade this zone.

A desire to create an uncorruptable money system. For the same reason the usa used currencies based in specific amounts of precious metals. It is a healthy lack of faith in future contollers of a country. It is the same reason you create a constitution that puts limits on the govt. This would be digital handcuffs on the financial manipulators.

Also it creates a faith in the money by users of it.

You describe a lot of reporting effort. This could all go away if you incude it directly into the currency system.

Just like namecoin I would suggest that the govenment coin uses the same hashing scheme. This way you can easily take in all the miners looking to make free extra money. This would possibly lead to many nations following the same idea. Miners would end up with a bucket of different currencies to toss up on global exchanges. Collectively they would keep everyone honest and would enforce the currency rules.

Some need to implement some generic bitoin branch that would give govts the incentive to imlempent it as a national currency. Incude some parameters such as where to get current tax rates and treasury output addresses and you might have something a small country or even a local community might adopt. Remember taxes and currency aren't strictly national.

Why not just reward people for mining the way bitcoin does? This way it is a non-centralized government recognized currency that also pays for govt activities.

Anyone in the world could mine the currency for the govt, and it would be taxed world wide, and then spent in the country by the govt.

I think a small government might benefit from using bitcoin as its currency, but it would face problems taxing it.

I could see them creating a separate chain that would be for their nation's currency. It would work on many of the same principles as bitcoin but would have tax collecting built into it so the government to eliminate two branches - tax collectors and currency management.

I see two ways that taxes could be collected:

1) Transaction tax - a percentage after the fee to the miner goes to the government treasury address
2) Wealth tax - a percentage of all moneys on all addresses goes to the government treasury address.

I think the second might work out better than the first, as the first would be a penalty on doing transactions, which might either decrease economic activity, or simply move money to banking services which would handle transactions without moving money between addresses.

Each branch and sub-branch of the government would have its own address, so all users would be able to see where money is distributed to.

For more some governments with more "communist" leanings, money brought in could be then redistributed evenly too all people in the country (so every person would have a public address individual to them). So someone would be tax N% but afterwards get some specific amount back. Those with a lot of money wouldn't get back as much as they paid in, and those with little money would get more back.

Interestingly if physical coins where created with their own addresses, and used as currency, they would be subject to the wealth tax, and thus the value physical money would decrease in value year to year.

Also interesting is that when your money is used outside of the country, it is still taxed just the same.

This thread isn't for an argument as to whether taxes are good or bad or even if wealth re-distribution is good or bad. So please take off any libertarian hat you have on at the moment, and think "If I were building a social-ist oriented state, how would I implement bitcoin."

If the basic technology between litecoin, bitcoin, and namecoin are all basically the same, has anyone come up with a universal gui client that would work with all of them. I am looking for one that runs on mac.

The thing is, people sell amazon gift cards for bitcoins. So any store eventually just competes with amazon by proxy.

The best would just be a storefront that sells giftcards to all of the major sites. Put on a markup of a $1-$2 and you have yourself a profit model without the messy details of physical inventory.

Also, make it so others can sell giftcards on your website. A lot of people get unwanted gift cards for christmas. This will make it so you don't have to handle dollars.

The person who did the one in the android store just needs to copy over to the amazon store. Email him.